Jay Ruby

Exposing yourself: Reflexivity, anthropology, and film

In our profession there is a lack of awareness even today that, in searching for truth, the student, like all human beings whatever they try to accomplish, is influenced by tradition, by his environment, and by his personality. Further, there is an irrational taboo against discussing this lack of awareness. It is astonishing that this taboo is commonly respected leaving the social scientist in naivete about what he is doing. Myrdal 1969:4

The last 20 years of visual anthropology – a critical review

This article is a critical review of the last 20 years of the development of visual anthropology in the United States and United Kingdom. It is argued that there are three approaches to the field – visual anthropology as ethnographic film, as the cultural study of pictorial media and as an inclusive anthropology of visual communication. The development and expansion of scholarly journals, training programmes and increasing general acceptance of this branch of cultural anthropology bodes well for the future. The anthropologist as image‐maker and scholar of the visible and pictorial world is becoming increasingly commonplace.

Portraying the Dead.

This article explores the custom of post-mortem photography. In nineteenth century America, this was a socially acceptable, publicly acknowledged form of photography. Professional photographers accepted commissions, advertised the service, and held professional discussions in their journals about the practice. The images were publicly displayed in wall frames and albums. Initially, death pictures were portraits which attempted to deny death by displaying the body as if asleep, or even conscious. By the turn-of-the-century, the deceased were displayed in a casket with an increasing emphasis upon the funeral. Today, families make their own photos; circulating them in a private manner so that many people assume that the custom has been abandoned. Counselors working with the parents of children who have died provide evidence that these images can be useful in the mourning process. The findings of this study suggest that a more thorough examination of the place of death-related photographs in the management of grief would be of value.

Where Is the Theory in Visual Anthropology

Is there a real theoretical underpinning for visual anthropology? Or are we just borrowing theoretical concepts, as needed, from other disciplines? Here eight visual anthropologists offer their thoughts on this fundamental question succinctly.

Post-Mortem portraiture in America

Abstract Photography has figured in social rituals surrounding death, funerals, and mourning since the inception of the new technology. Photographys appeal lies in its ability to provide us with a mirror image, one that is thought to be unimpeachable and permanent, and it seems quite natural that death, as a rite of passage, should also be commemorated photographically.

Images of Rural America: View photographs and picture postcards

Abstract The scholarly study of photography is divided into two basic approaches; one is concerned with philosophical questions of aesthetics and truth (What defines photography as a fine art? Are photographs true images of the world?), while the other is devoted to photography as social process.1

Eric Michaels: An appreciation

… I got into media studies, as an anthropologist, because I believed the media were the belly of the beast, and because I thought television was central to the creation of the extraordinary contradictions that plagued the contemporary world. [Michaels 1983] It would seem that Malinowskis stricture that the function of the ethnographer was to see the natives culture from the natives own point of view could at last be achieved—literally, and not metaphorically. What would such a world be like, and more importantly, what problems have we to set before our students now that will, at the least, not hinder them from coming to an understanding of an age in which man presents himself not in person but through the mediation of visual symbolic forms… It is now no longer possible for the student of culture to ignore the fact that people all over the world have learned, and will continue in great numbers to learn, how to use the visual symbolic mode. Anthropologists must begin to articulate the problems that will ...

Studying Sideways in Malibu

In 1972, Laura Nader challenged anthropologists to “study up,” that is, to study the colonizers rather than the colonized, the culture of power rather than the culture of the powerless, the culture of affluence rather than the culture of poverty. She also encouraged anthropologists to “study sideways”—that is, to study people who were a part of their own culture.1 Some have argued that these two groups are essentially the same. Both of her admonitions have indeed been followed by people such as Sherry Ortner, who studied her high school class for New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of ’582 and examined the culture of independent filmmaking in the recent book Not Hollywood: Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream.3 For the past 15 years I have been studying sideways, while looking for new ways to publish the results. In early 2000, I explored my hometown, Oak Park, Illinois, in Oak Park Stories, a series of autobiographical, experimental, reflexive and digital ethnographies that looked at a 40-year-old social experiment in planned integration (http://www.der.org/ films/oak-park-stories.html). More recently, I have examined two manifestations of what I call “Southland Bohemia”—a coffee house and an arts community in Malibu, California. Coffee House Positano: A Bohemian Oasis—1957–1962 is an enhanced eBook with the University of Colorado Press (http:// www.upcolorado.com/book/2726). Here is a brief summary of that work. In 1957, Mike Dutton, a radio/television pioneer, and his wife, Lorees, an aspiring writer, opened a coffee house on the southern border of Malibu. Located on the cliff side of the Pacific Coast Highway on a 140acre undeveloped, chaparral-covered hillside, Positano quickly became a success even though there was no sign on the highway to indicate where it was located and the Duttons never advertised. People learned of its existence strictly by word of mouth. Positano was fundamentally differ-

A Unique Life in Film

Jean Rouch, anthropologist-filmmaker, is an enigma. For anyone interested in ethnographic film, he is undoubtedly the producer of many masterworks. In France, his reputation is even more grand in that he is considered one of the most important of their filmmakers, in league with the likes of Godard and Truffaut. Godard wrote several glowing critiques of Rouch’s films in the influential journal Cahiers du cinema and used Raoul Coutard, cinematographer for Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer for his groundbreaking film Breathless. Rouch’s influence can easily be seen in Godard’s films, and Roberto Rossellini, Italian neorealist filmmaker, has noted how impressed he was with Rouch’s films, particularly Jaguar. There is a large body of critical and popular literature about Rouch in French, and several of his films have had theatrical releases in Europe. In the United States and the United Kingdom, most of his 100 films are not available, and the scholarly literature about him is scarce and recent. Steven Feld’s translation of Rouch’s Cine-Ethnography (2003) provides us with translations of some of Rouch’s writings and reprints of articles by others about him. Paul Stoller’s The Cinematic Griot (1992) examines some of Rouch’s West African films from the perspective of French anthropology. We now have a much-needed addition to this rather short list with the publication of Paul Henley’s masterful study, The Adventure of the Real. Henley, the director of Manchester’s Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, has had access to most of Rouch’s films as well as to the French literature that is seldom translated into English. This is the definitive English-language study and will remain so for a long time. As film distribution companies like Documentary Educational Resources (Watertown, MA) are expanding their offerings of Rouch’s work, those of us in the English-speaking world will be able to view the films and make good use of Henley’s thorough and extensive scholarship. Because Rouch was employed as a researcher at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), he had few responsibilities other than to pursue his anthropological and filmmaking interests. He seldom needed outside funding except when a film was blown up to 35 mm and theatrically

Digital Oak Park: an experiment

Abstract This essay describes an attempt to convey anthropological knowledge by an innovative means. Combining text, photographs, and video clips in a nonlinear fashion, these four ethnographic portraits explore aspects of Oak Park, Illinois, an upper-middle-class suburb of Chicago renowned for its success in creating and maintaining ethnic diversity. The portraits explore the impact of this diversity among Euro-American, African American and lesbian families. One of the portraits examines the Oak Park Regional Housing Center, the cornerstone of the villages integration efforts. This experiment is offered as an alternative to the more common means of publishing scholarly research – the book or the film.